Trying Something New- Paper.li

This week in INTE5665, we were given a list of sites to experience for the first time. Some of them, like tumblr and vine, I have dabbled in, but never got really into them like many other people do. In addition, many of the other choices were primarily focused on social media. I wanted to truly immerse myself in a new experience all together, so decided to take on Paper.li.

This seems like a great tool for the classroom- I can specifically search for a topic and it even searches through reliable social media to give current news on whatever topic I am looking for. All this was taken from the overall description when initially checking out the website.

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Use the full force of Paper.li to find and collect content that's aligned with your audience's interests. We use natural language processing, machine learning and social signals to analyse and extract the most relevant and engaging stories from social media and the web.

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The website starts off walking you through the steps in order to fully utilize the website. It's a very nice, optional process. It gives you the option to continue using the assistance, figure it out on your own, or choose to receive even more assistance. The interesting part is the site allows you to have it search social media sites that you specify. You can plug it a specific person you might want to follow, a hashtag, or a twitter list. In addition, you can connect other social medias such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

The site then goes on to allow you to pick which articles you would like to make a "page" of. You can pick and choose through the articles the site pulls up off of your social media recommendations. Going a step further, you have the option to move articles around and place them by preference. In addition, you can "blacklist" an author or website if they are providing content you don't need/agree with. The Page provides your with a headline, photo, and quick teaser about the article. You can actually go in and click on it, and it will take you to an outside website where the article originated.

This website essentially lets your create your own personal newspapers. You are picking the content and placing it all on a single page that makes everything extremely accessible to your viewers. It is an interesting concept, and could definitely be taken to a further step depending on the person's commitment. Speaking for myself as a teacher, this would be a great tool in the classroom. My only concern would be with blocking out inappropriate content- while initially searching through the site, there were some suggested topics of a sexual nature that would not be school appropriate, especially for my middle school kiddos. Personally, I would steer away from something like this because of all the knitty-gritty set up. For my personal life, I would like to find a more simplistic aspect and would have no real use for a tool like this. I prefer to continue consuming news in my usual methods- news apps on my phone, social media, podcasts (The Daily every morning!), etc. I wouldn't mind using this website so much if there was a simpler way to convey what I would like to be updated about without me having to sit there and plug in all the specific social media aspects. On the flip side, I love that I can do that if I was using it for school purposes.